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Published on

02 May 2012

Abstract

Cell imaging and analysis ability is crucial to both fundamental biomedicine studies and clinical diagnostics. Our group shows that by incorporating new nanoplasmonic and microfluidic devices, current digital optical imaging technologies can be empowered for novel cellular diagnostics and digital mobile health applications. In the first part of my talk I will introduce a novel, portable and low cost nanoplasmonic sample slide we created for living cell diagnostic imaging. The addition of this new device to digital optical cell imaging systems can provide a new powerful optical excitation function - nanoplasmon coupled optical resonance excitation (nanoplasmon CORE), yet without any physical disturbance to existing imaging systems or related procedure routinely used in cell biology research labs. With this device the 3D sensitivity and photostability of current laser scanning confocal fluorescence microscopy cell imaging will be improved for 2-3 orders of magnitude. The application such as 3D dynamic imaging of very early stage, single molecule level expressions of green fluorescence proteins (GFP) in live cells can be enabled by this device. In the second part I will talk about how we reinvented a music compact disc (CD) into a digital cell optical imaging platform by incorporating novel microfluidic engineering designs. We presented the novel digital microfluidic CD device and its preliminary application of counting microparticles and living cells in minute-volume fluidic samples. No other detection instruments, but a standard CD/DVD optical drive in a personal computer is used for reading and decoding the quantitative cellular information on the digital microfluidic CD. Our efforts are the first step towards creating a truly mobile, low-cost, ubiquitously accessible device - health diagnostic compact disc (HDCD) for point-of-care biosensing and health diagnostics especially in remote or impoverished settings with limited medical infrastructure and health care workers.

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